Interview with Father Leo Thomas O.P.

Newsletter of the Western Dominicans – Winter, 1996

For nineteen years Leo Thomas has been training lay people in the Seattle area to work as pastoral care ministers in the church and has been writing about his work. What began as an idea and a perceived need has become a formal program, with a salaried director and about twenty volunteers. The idea was the belief that many people in the church can benefit from pastoral relationships with other lay people. Leo, who spent several years on the teaching staff of the pastoral training program run by the Menninger Foundation's division of religion and psychiatry, knew that lay people involved in pastoral care need quality training. But the training so often provided for them is “a watered-down seminary curriculum. This is not helpful because it values what they're not – clerics – and doesn‘t value what they are and have – lay people with the desire and experience to serve. What is different about our approach, I believe, is that we recognize the lay role as a strength and use it as our starting point.”

Leo added that “My passion is to train others to do what I, myself, have been trained to do. All of the writing that I am doing is in support of the training program. I, with the help of Jim Webster and two clinically trained women, designed the program in 1977 because we saw the coming need of training lay people to do quality pastoral care. We saw a lot of pastoral care being offered by lay people of good will – at that time mostly by Charismatic Renewal people – with no training. And people in ministry need training. The training we offer is modeled on the program that Dave O'Rourke and I offered from 1969 to 1974. The pastoral care work of our trainees is supervised, and we make use of structured group reflection on ministry.“

What about the writing? Leo said “I wrote my first book, The Healing Team, alone while I was assigned to Salt Lake. (It has been translated into Chinese!) Since then, the last seven years, I have been writing with a collaborator, Jan Alkire. She and I wrote a revision of The Healing Team retitled Healing Ministry and Healing as a Parish Ministry.”

“Our major effort has been to package a program which will enable lay people to do pastoral care ministry. It is titled Formation for Healing Ministry (FHM). It is a two year long program that we have offered for the last 19 years in the Seattle area. That ’we’ is the Institute for Christian Ministries which is the name for our organization. We are packaging [the FHM program] in order to be able to offer it in distant locations. Already it is being offered in Canada, Africa, and four other states in the U.S. I am pleased that it is ecumenical, and approximately 30% of the people who go through it are from Protestant traditions.”

Are you happy with the result? “Very. My reward is the affirmation I receive from readers who tell me how much the program of training and the books supporting it have helped them to become quality ministers. My passion is to train others to do what I, myself, have been trained to do.”

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